I think one of the few things we can all agree on lately is that it’s been a tumultuous year for our fiery and often tragic political and social landscape. This is what kept sticking in my head as I worked to come up...

Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host's lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

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This full throttle debut gets my vote for best story collection of the year! Filled with surreal, dystopic and satirical explorations of race, class, and consumerism in America, the first story will make your jaw drop--and it only gets weirder from there. Nana is a big, promising talent and a fitting heir to the likes of Vonnegut. Terrific!

This masterful novel is perfect for fans of Virginia Woolf and Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Winner of 2018's Booker Prize, MILKMAN Is an intense, stream of consciousness novel that takes place during the 'troubles' in Ireland, although no place (or character) is actually named. The narrator, a young woman, is slowly taken over by a strange person known simply as 'milkman'. In a society teeming with poverty and threatened by imminent violence, Anna Burns creates an entire language, showing the subtle ways a person's life can suddenly belong to someone else. Reminiscent of A GIRL IS A HALF FORMED THING, MILKMAN is by turns sly and comical, a book that belongs in its own category altogether.

Though best known for his films--masterworks like Gates of Heaven and The Fog of War--Errol Morris is a hell of a writer too. The Ashtray, his third book, is a philosophical inquiry into the work of Thomas Kuhn, the famed pop academic with whom Morris takes serious issue (some of this may be personal: Kuhn once threw an ashtray at grad student Morris' head, thus sparking the title). Best about this book? It feels just as kaleidoscopic as one of Morris' documentaries, blending different modes (photographs, interviews, histories, recollections) to make its argument: in short, its process is just as important as its point. It's a worthy addition to Morris' astonishing body of work.

An allegorical wonder from 1950's Uruguay. A woman attempts suicide on the eve of her 30th birthday, but instead of dying she becomes hyper-aware of her surroundings and wanders the woods and village outside her apartment. The sight of her form throws the village into chaos, as they are forced to confront the rocky religious morality and misogyny their lives are based on. Definitely an underrated feminist classic -- good for fans of the satirical cult fave HERLAND, or the comically dark prose of Djuna Barnes.

In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”